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Happy New Year, Please Pass the Nyquil
Jan. 5th, 2006 12:44 amWhile we were traveling, we caught up with about thirty relatives, three old grad school friends, and the Upper Respiratory Bug That's Going Around. It's very nice to be functional again. I am looking forward to being actually well.
We met up with the grad school friends at the MLA, a conference where 10,000 language and literature scholars gather to suffer social anxiety and panic attacks in response to one another's presence. Well, okay, that's a cheap shot, but not altogether wrong. Back in the day, I learned how to enjoy the MLA, how to find the sorts of unofficial side-events where people let themselves be human together, how to pick the panels and talks likely to have more substance and less posturing. I was lucky, in that scholars who study the poet I wrote my dissertation on tend to be mutually supportive. Still, the main collective emotion in the air at the MLA is terror. People walk through the hotel lobbies with painfully stiff body posture and pinched, suspicious faces. And instead of getting caught up in it, I looked at that and congratulated myself that it no longer had anything to do with me. Two of my friends put brave faces on for long enough to get the hell out of the annual open bar hosted by our alma mater, Fair-to-Middling State University, only to have fairly serious meltdowns the moment we got to a safer social space. That could have been me. Would have, if I hadn't escaped. Extraversion will only get you so far.
The relatives were mostly cheery, even the ones we caught the Bug from. My niece Kate, age 5 months, is a fundamentally happy being, nearly all the time. On the rare occasion when she cries, it's for a reason, and the reason is usually easy to figure out. So I think she may be a changeling from outer space. My understanding was always that real human infants weren't like that. But she's the cutest little changeling!
The family business I didn't go into is a law practice that specializes in divorce and custody cases. When I was growing up, the family business was the army, but Dad retired from the JAG Corps, and my sister dropped out of ROTC when she got sick of the scholarship students' unprofessional attitude about military service. Now Dad and Pru are law partners, and my mother handles their computer system stuff. The unofficial motto for the practice: Let Our Family Break Up Your Family. A more blasphemous alternative motto: What God Hath Joined, Let The Averys Put Asunder. Over the holidays, there were few enough clients to deal with that they could catch up on paperwork, move furniture to storage, hang out with Dan and me for lunch, etc. It was odd and charming to see Dad and Pru and their office manager sitting on the office floor in a circle around Kate, who is about to figure out crawling any minute now, while they alternated between brass-tacks talk about billing clients and filing motions at the courthouse, and baby talk directed at the infant.
The in-laws were a lot of fun and minimal fuss on this trip. They're really good at gift-giving as an expression of affection. It's what everybody's trying for, only they almost always get it right. I'll have to go to school on them. It's something I could be better at.
Rochester was, of course, snowy. My grandparents are old and frail. I fret. I'd fret more, but they live surrounded by my various aunts, uncles, and cousins, and they still have their independence after several strokes and assorted surgeries apiece. My grandfather is starting to urge people to tell him which bits of furniture they'd like, so he can make detailed addenda to the will. It would be tempting to freak out about that, but my grandparents are sublimely un-freaked-out by their impending mortality. After all those strokes, immortality looks less appealing, I suppose. Or maybe they know something else I should be going to school on. I got as far as comprehending the fact of my mortality, but making peace with it? Seriously unfinished business.
Since Dan and I got home, I've been coughing and sneezing my way through the day, coughing and sneezing on my students, coughing and sneezing on doctors who want to see me about things entirely unrelated to the cold. Had an unfortunate run-in with the Phlebotomist From Hell, and after her attempt to draw blood on me, if viewed only from wrist to shoulder, I might be mistaken for a spectacularly inept heroin addict. This, too, shall pass. I tried reading Clausewitz, but with the cold, I didn't have the quality of attention to do that kind of research for the little book. So I've been comforting myself with Alma Alexander's The Secrets of Jin-Shei, which is just the sort of novel a girl like me can take comfort in while fending off microbes. I wish it could have been about 200 pages longer.
Despite the brain-fog, I'm nearly done with the first draft of that short supernatural farce in the New Jerseyan mode, which, as it turns out, wants to be a novella when it grows up. Also, it's no longer so keen on being a farcical, though it doesn't mind being a comedy of epistemology. Soon, it will be complete enough for me to figure out how to make it good. Three more drafts from now, I think I'll like it a lot.
Still no word about the big book from the Shiny Young Agent.
We met up with the grad school friends at the MLA, a conference where 10,000 language and literature scholars gather to suffer social anxiety and panic attacks in response to one another's presence. Well, okay, that's a cheap shot, but not altogether wrong. Back in the day, I learned how to enjoy the MLA, how to find the sorts of unofficial side-events where people let themselves be human together, how to pick the panels and talks likely to have more substance and less posturing. I was lucky, in that scholars who study the poet I wrote my dissertation on tend to be mutually supportive. Still, the main collective emotion in the air at the MLA is terror. People walk through the hotel lobbies with painfully stiff body posture and pinched, suspicious faces. And instead of getting caught up in it, I looked at that and congratulated myself that it no longer had anything to do with me. Two of my friends put brave faces on for long enough to get the hell out of the annual open bar hosted by our alma mater, Fair-to-Middling State University, only to have fairly serious meltdowns the moment we got to a safer social space. That could have been me. Would have, if I hadn't escaped. Extraversion will only get you so far.
The relatives were mostly cheery, even the ones we caught the Bug from. My niece Kate, age 5 months, is a fundamentally happy being, nearly all the time. On the rare occasion when she cries, it's for a reason, and the reason is usually easy to figure out. So I think she may be a changeling from outer space. My understanding was always that real human infants weren't like that. But she's the cutest little changeling!
The family business I didn't go into is a law practice that specializes in divorce and custody cases. When I was growing up, the family business was the army, but Dad retired from the JAG Corps, and my sister dropped out of ROTC when she got sick of the scholarship students' unprofessional attitude about military service. Now Dad and Pru are law partners, and my mother handles their computer system stuff. The unofficial motto for the practice: Let Our Family Break Up Your Family. A more blasphemous alternative motto: What God Hath Joined, Let The Averys Put Asunder. Over the holidays, there were few enough clients to deal with that they could catch up on paperwork, move furniture to storage, hang out with Dan and me for lunch, etc. It was odd and charming to see Dad and Pru and their office manager sitting on the office floor in a circle around Kate, who is about to figure out crawling any minute now, while they alternated between brass-tacks talk about billing clients and filing motions at the courthouse, and baby talk directed at the infant.
The in-laws were a lot of fun and minimal fuss on this trip. They're really good at gift-giving as an expression of affection. It's what everybody's trying for, only they almost always get it right. I'll have to go to school on them. It's something I could be better at.
Rochester was, of course, snowy. My grandparents are old and frail. I fret. I'd fret more, but they live surrounded by my various aunts, uncles, and cousins, and they still have their independence after several strokes and assorted surgeries apiece. My grandfather is starting to urge people to tell him which bits of furniture they'd like, so he can make detailed addenda to the will. It would be tempting to freak out about that, but my grandparents are sublimely un-freaked-out by their impending mortality. After all those strokes, immortality looks less appealing, I suppose. Or maybe they know something else I should be going to school on. I got as far as comprehending the fact of my mortality, but making peace with it? Seriously unfinished business.
Since Dan and I got home, I've been coughing and sneezing my way through the day, coughing and sneezing on my students, coughing and sneezing on doctors who want to see me about things entirely unrelated to the cold. Had an unfortunate run-in with the Phlebotomist From Hell, and after her attempt to draw blood on me, if viewed only from wrist to shoulder, I might be mistaken for a spectacularly inept heroin addict. This, too, shall pass. I tried reading Clausewitz, but with the cold, I didn't have the quality of attention to do that kind of research for the little book. So I've been comforting myself with Alma Alexander's The Secrets of Jin-Shei, which is just the sort of novel a girl like me can take comfort in while fending off microbes. I wish it could have been about 200 pages longer.
Despite the brain-fog, I'm nearly done with the first draft of that short supernatural farce in the New Jerseyan mode, which, as it turns out, wants to be a novella when it grows up. Also, it's no longer so keen on being a farcical, though it doesn't mind being a comedy of epistemology. Soon, it will be complete enough for me to figure out how to make it good. Three more drafts from now, I think I'll like it a lot.
Still no word about the big book from the Shiny Young Agent.
